Romans, Meet Rockets: Darkest Of Days

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The completely brilliant/insane idea behind Darkest Of Days is getting to time travel through various famous conflicts from the past, and mow everyone down with a machine gun. You see, the problem with guns in the Olden Days is they were rubbish. Only capable of firing one shot at a time, or very poor at targeting at a long range, they were such a faff and fiddle that by the time you’d managed to poke the pokey thing down the barrel there was a reasonable chance you’d be entirely dead. What they should have done, and what Darkest Of Days finally puts right, is arrange for time travellers from the future to bring them semi-automatic instruments of enormous death. It’s both tasteful, and delicious.

Set to be released on September 8th, it’s coming from 8Monkey Labs, whose only previous game is something called AquaSpank. The publisher, Phantom EFX, is equally obscure, usually focusing on slot machine and casino games for the PC and mobiles. It also features jaunts in the Battle of Little Bighorn, as well as a romp in a volcano-encumbered Pompeii. I think it looks awesome. And there should be a demo along later today.

In the first video you can compare the difference between battling in the American Civil War with a one-shot musket, and a machine gun.

In this second one enquiring minds can learn the distinction between fighting in the Second World War with a Bolt-Action rifle, and something called a Combat Shotgun.

Eh, forget the clever and get to shooting people. Why not, i’d be interested if you start with an era appropriate gun, and if you die you can either retry or cop out and use a modern gun. If you die with a modern gun you can try with some futuristic laser cannon.

I feel as if the violence being dealt out so casually is perhaps a little underwhelming, a little lacking in impact, compared to, say, Brothers in Arms II or even Call of Duty 5. Not that I’m able to tell from a couple of bite-sized trailers. Who knows? I await a demo.

@Schmung – yes releasing the Marmoset toolbag for the public was very, very awesome. It’s a great way to realtime render and present one’s 3d models very easily, without all the fuss of trying to find a viewport shader and then setting it up and then not being able to use AA and shit.

For that reason alone, I’ll be buying this game, the dudes are awesome.

tapanister : yeah, it’s really nice. Took some faffing for me to get it working properly as it was doing some funky smoothing with my obj files initially, but for presenting your work it’s absolutely top notch.

Hopefully their kindness is rewarded and I guess a fair few people from Polycount/GA etc will buy anyway simply because of the toolbag.

The sense of humor in this along with the manic absurdity is great. That it is cloaked in a quasi-serious storyline only makes it more amusing. Go check out the trailer on the game’s site and on the devs’s site.

One thing that would be interesting is something like this where you’re very vulnerable, but have massive firepower. So the Romans might have rubbish ranged abilities, but if they catch up with you then they’re going to murder you.

I was a bit underwhelmed, and I went in with high expectations. Despite the wonderful setting it just looked like it played out like another mediocre run-of-the-mill shooter. Of course it’s only about 5 minutes worth of footage and I could be wrong. The game clearly has a sense of humor in it, and hopefully they’ll play the comedy angle right as to charm to pants off of you all the way through as opposed to instilling the sense of disappointment Junior High Schoolers felt all over the world after playing State of Emergency for more than ten minutes.

“Time travellers take back modern weapons to ensure the ‘correct’ side wins histortical wars” is a really great idea, with a lot of room for a good sense of humour and fun gameplay.

Those trailers however, showed major AI issues (shooting the entire confederate army in the back?) and a real, sort of, unresponsiveness to the weapons; say what you like about CoD4, but at no point did i really feel particularly Detached from the guns/killing in there; whereas this looks more like “you click the mouse button and people are dead”, which is a shame.

Maybe I’m being a little overly sensitive, but I don’t remember a lot of other games where you machine gun retreating soldiers in the back. War’s hell and all, that just seemed a little tasteless. I don’t know exactly why, it just sort of rubbed me the wrong way.

Yeah, it’s clearly lacking in quality next to something like the Call of Duty games, but man, the concept is sound. I definitely think the further back into history you go, the more fun the game will be. Introducing Romans to GUNS will be superb. I just hope the NPCs will react in some way to all these technology.

There’s a couple of trailers on the site which grabbed my interest. I like this mechanic of keeping certain people alive, and I’m interested as to how the time traveller stuff will play out in terms of story.

What this game does do is remind me of the sadly delayed Alliance: Silent War. That looked really very good. Superb graphics (well, back in 2006!), a huge selection of weapons, and in intriguing storyline. Oh well!

@The Hammer: I was trying to think of the name of the game this reminded me of, and Alliance: Silent War was it. Both have the using different weapons in different environments throughout history thing going for them, I’m surprised more games haven’t used the concept.

The enemy don’t seem to be scared enough by the appearance of a soldier with a spectacularly OP weapon… part of the fun should surely be the waves of panic as you stride among the enemy with a terrifying device spitting death at a never-before-seen rate. And in the game, obviously.

Err…. I could only see this as being interesting if the AI was absolutely fantastic. I at least like the enemies in my FPS games to have a hope of fighting back, instead of being the closest thing to unarmed there is. It’s not going to be satisfying to eliminate vast swathes of enemies if they could never actually fight back, eh?